November 14, 2009

A BRACE OF BAPTISTS, A POPE BASHER

Not far from our winter home in the hanging-chad state of Florida, a local minister is championing an amendment to the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage.

This minister has even published his conviction that the prospect of gay marriage represents “a tremendous social crisis, greater even than the issue of slavery.” He’s gone so far as to suggest that if gay marriage goes unchecked, it won’t be long before people are marrying animals.

(Alarmed when I read this to him, Bill sat up, his ears at attention. I reassured him the ASPCU would never let it happen.)

Coming on the heels of the flap over Barack Obama’s former minister (another Baptist, by the way), the Florida pastor’s pulpit-pounding harangues take on special meaning. The white minister is convinced that, if allowed to marry, the gay single-digit percentage of the population will destroy the true meaning of marriage for the straight majority. And along with it, the fabric of civilization. By contrast, his black counterpart used to call on God to damn the U.S. for racism.

As if God weren’t busy enough. But given the cause to which the white Florida divine now zealously lends his support, what person with any sense of fair play would not be inclined to give Barack Obama’s former minister a break?

All Reverend Jeremiah Wright can be criticized for is having failed, about twenty years ago, to imagine an America radically different from the one he was occupying in Chicago’s south side ghetto. An America so different that it would one day elect as President a young member of his all-black congregation. If Wright had imagined this twenty years ago, chances are good he would have sought out a therapist.

Some days later, the same Florida newspaper printed a letter bashing Roman Catholics. This epistle took believers to task for admiring the current pope. The writer claimed their admiration revealed a failure to understand how, through his rejection of contraception, Benedict XVI was responsible for millions of deaths in sub-Saharan Africa. The writer insisted that the “suffering and deaths of …wives and frequently of the children they bear in this HIV/AIDS holocaust have exceeded by far that suffered by the Jews at the hands of the Nazis.”

A man of the cloth tells us the prospect of homosexuals getting married represents a social disaster greater than slavery? Another calls on God to drop what he’s doing and damn a country because of its record on race? A third visionary asserts that the pope’s stand on rubbers is responsible for more suffering than the Holocaust?

Bill and I have a suggestion.

Let’s start a fund. Aside, obviously, from administrative expenses, this fund’s only line item will be payments made to young people working their way through college. Their light-duty summer job will consist of carrying buckets of water to the homes of people like the two ministers and the letter writer who hates the pope. After inserting a pre-printed note in the mailbox, the student rings the doorbell. When the door opens, the student throws the bucket of water on the nut case in the open doorway, then runs away yelling “Read your mail!”